Each year Adobe’s Max
conference is a showcase of the company’s newest products and future
directions. This year in San Diego, California was the largest yet, with
over 10,000 attendees, including yours truly. The scale of the event is
in keeping with the growing size of Adobe’s product portfolio, which
now includes dozens of products and services spanning design, video,
illustration, photography, and more. Central to the conference were the
themes of Adobe’s solutions increasingly becoming what it calls
cloud-native, and its expanding use of all-things AI, wrapped into a
rubric it calls Project Sensei.

The Cloud-native future of Creative Cloud

Initially, Creative Cloud was primarily a way
to move Adobe from licensed software to a subscription model.
Increasingly, though, it is moving to cloud access for assets of all
kinds. A growing drive to support non-local group collaboration has
helped speed this along. Its Cloud Native initiative takes this even
further, and features applications and assets that are natively
available and accessible on any platform, from any place. Some of
Adobe’s newer tools, like XD and Project Spark typify this. In addition,
Adobe showed off a cloud-based Lightroom-like project, codenamed
Nimbus, that will be available for beta testing next year.

Like nearly everyone, Adobe is moving to AI-enable anything it can think of

Some
of Photoshop’s coolest features, like Content-Aware Fill have used AI
technology to do their magic, but with its 2017 product line, Adobe is
greatly expanding its use of various kinds of machine learning and AI.
For example, Adobe Stock is now equipped with Visual Search, so you can
look for images that are similar to one that you like, but perhaps can’t
license. Adobe even sneak peeked the ability to let you visual search
on a selection out of your Photoshop document, so you could mock up a
composition somewhat like what you’re looking for and have Adobe track
down a finished version that is available for license.

Project Felix aims to let everyone in on the power of using 3D models to build photo-realistic scenes

Even experienced Photoshop users can be
daunted by the difficulty of importing and placing realistic 3D models
in their scenes. 3D tools that produce commercial quality renderings are
complicated, as is the process of acquiring models and materials that
work together with lighting simulation to create a scene. Adobe
demonstrated a unique new “all-in-one” solution, code-named Project
Felix, that it expects to beta in 2017. With Felix, a designer can find
models in Adobe Stock (or elsewhere), apply a selection of materials
(many of which will also be in Adobe Stock), and then place them on a
background.

Adobe has used some of its Sensei magic to
allow automatic object placement on the ground plane of a background
image, and to allow realistic lighting by creating a sort-of light probe
from the background image. Another piece of magic is a Magic Wand that
allows intelligent selection of portions of a 3D object. This is a big
deal for anyone who has ever tried to re-color a 3D model they got from a
typical online library.

Photoshop gets Templates, and XD gets style guides

One of the major themes for Adobe this year is
improved tools for sharing, as part of its overall push to support more
effective collaboration. To that end, Photoshop now includes Templates,
a concept common enough for those used to Office, but often missing
from design tools. With Templates — many of which are downloadable from
Adobe Stock — a designer can start with a base design and set of layers,
and then simply customize it to their needs, like I did with this News
announcement template:

Photoshop has finally added templates, for quick semi-custom designs. Many are free courtesy of Adobe Stock. [Nice plug, David –Ed.]

Of course, the dark side of templates will be
that zillions of pieces of content will now look suspiciously similar,
just like we saw when people started using Word and PowerPoint
templates.

Cloud-native design will enable true collaboration

In a similar vein, groups producing a large
number of designs using Adobe’s innovative XD (eXperience Design) app,
which supports rapid design and prototyping of multi-platform interfaces,
can now share libraries of objects, colors, and other assets. Even
better, changing a color or font in the library can change it across all
the places where it is used. That allows design teams or companies to
treat libraries like style guides, to insure consistency in visual
design across projects without adding a lot of manual labor. Adobe has
also added live device preview to XD, so you can see your prototype
running on whatever physical device you have available to test it on.
Since it is actually a full version of XD running on the device, any
changes you make in your prototype are immediately reflected on the
device.

Adobe’s XD allows designers to collaborate on multi-platform interface designs. It now includes support for layers

Version control is another issue that
designers, just like software developers, have struggled with forever.
Adobe showed off a clever idea for a new visual timeline feature in XD.
It allows any member of the team to use a slider to go back in time (a
bit like the history slider in Google Earth) and see what the design
looked like at that time. This can be useful in case you want to
resurrect elements of an older design, as you can simply copy them and
then paste them into the current version. Along with that, Adobe is
looking at a true cloud-native system for XD, that would allow
simultaneous editing of the same design document by multiple authors,
with annotations on which art boards are being worked on by which
contributors.

Photoshop adds powerful search capability

Search (a la Office 2016’s new toolbar Help search)
makes for a quick way to find and select a tool or command by name. You
can also search through your layers, if you’re the type who uses a ton
of them. The Learn tab under Search is a unified way to search all of
Adobe’s official online Photoshop documentation — including tutorials.

This is a huge leap forward compared with some
prior releases, where searching help seemed to find mostly arbitrary
bits of user-contributed suggestions. As you’d expect, you can also
search Adobe Stock for images tagged with a particular keyword. For
those who collaborate with others using Libraries, you can now follow a
library, giving you read-only access and having the libraries contents
automatically updated when they change.

While this year’s Max didn’t have any single
massive breakthrough — although the undercurrent of AI-everywhere and
real-time collaboration certainly qualify as major themes — Adobe
continues to push the envelope in enough directions that serious
creatives will have plenty to look forward to as the 2017 version of its
Creative Cloud rolls out.